


Threads

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-16 04:07:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18513586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: Hurt/comfort and a look at how Mulder deals with grief.





	Threads

When Samantha broke her collarbone, Fox had done what his mother asked and grabbed the pale shawl draped over the high-back chair at her dressing table. In the light it seemed to glisten. It was silky soft between his fingers, sliding through his grasp until he felt the tassel strands. He threaded it back and forth through his closed fist, developing a comfortable rhythm as he walked back to the hallway where his sister was howling. Reluctant to part with it, he wondered why his mother felt the need to wear something so exquisitely beautiful just to ride to the hospital. It was only when she wrapped it around his crying sister’s shoulder to hold up her arm that he realised it was to be a sling. Under the red gaze of his father, he felt so dumb, blinked away the sharp stab of tears.

His gut iced with guilt. He’d helped Samantha up on to the rope swing. He’d teased her about not going high enough. Later, his mother gave him the shawl to hold while they went for x-rays and he scrunched it to his face, inhaling the smell of her perfume to cover the cloying taste of hospital antiseptic in his throat.

***

Scully had woken uncharacteristically late. She’d missed the first coffee of the morning. He’d checked on her a few times but she lay curled on her side with the covers hiding her face. When she did join him, she complained of feeling achy and cold.

“Your face is a little flushed,” he said, buttering her toast.

She pushed the plate away and sipped her coffee. “I’m not really hungry.”

“I’ll grab the groceries. You go back to bed.”

Her gentle snuff told him that she might just do that and he dropped a kiss on her head. She coughed quietly into her hand and he plucked a tissue from the box. She smiled up at him with red-rimmed eyes and pressed it to her nose. He thought of the shawl, something he hadn’t remembered in years, and as he drove down the gravelled path he wondered where it had ended up. He imagined it folded into a box along with his mother’s perfume dispensers and the ornate gold brush and mirror set. Items too personal to either sell or to keep on display. Those boxes were probably in the attic, decorated with cobwebs. He thought he should do something about that. Get up there with Scully one weekend and clear it out. Maybe, he mused as he pulled into the parking lot, the attic was like the mind. Too much clutter wasn’t any way to live.

During the night, Scully’s coughing grew worse. She shivered next to him but her skin was on fire. Her breath was bitter as she struggled to breathe, rolling from side to side to get comfortable. Through chattering teeth, she self-diagnosed flu – the sudden onset, the fever, the muscle and joint pain. He wanted to take her to the emergency room but she shook her head before hacking into her pillow.

“Sleep,” she whispered. “Just let me sleep.”

In the morning, her chest rose and fell with each shallow inhalation and the rattling wheeze had him dismissing her weak protests in favour of driving her to the hospital right then. She sat in the passenger seat barking out coughs as the scenery passed in a blur as ghostly-grey as her skin.

The waiting room at the ER was stuffed with people. Vomiting babies and old men clutching their chests were promptly triaged. The drunk and drug-affected were left to yell and abuse. Middle-aged FBI agents sat on the floor.

“Scully, who do I need to arrest to get you seen?”

Her head sank further into the crook of his shoulder so that her chin dug into his collarbone. He pulled her hair away from her face and she coughed so hard that she couldn’t gulp in enough air between rounds. She slumped across his chest, letting out a soft gurgle.

“Nurse! Someone! My wife needs help.” He laid her across his thighs and thumped his fist against the wall behind him. “Now!”

***

He was allowed to visit Samantha after her surgery but there were no chairs to sit on. His mother was sleeping in the only one. His father had pushed him through the curtains and walked away, muttering about how he couldn’t stand hospitals. Just standing there, behind the curtain, made him feel powerless. There was a busyness to the place, a hum of activity outside, but inside the small patch that was his sister’s cubicle there was a muted stillness. It made his own body thrum with a need to move. Yet he was stuck to the floor, unable to work out what he should do. Talking seemed so fruitless.

“Fox, did you bring me anything to eat?” He looked at his sister, pale against the starched pillow, her arm balanced in a fresh white sling. There was a tray across her lap containing the cold remnants of meat and vegetables. “The food here is disgusting. Mom said you’d bring me some Twinkies.”

He shook his head and held out his hands. “Dad didn’t tell me.” Their mom twitched in her sleep, sending her purse falling to the floor. He picked out her wallet and took some coins. “I’ll go find something.” At least he could feel useful.

When he came back with an armful of candy bars, Samantha was asleep and his mother was straightening the green blanket at the foot of the bed. She looked down at the packets in his hands and tutted.

“She’ll be home tomorrow. But there’ll be no more horseplay, do you understand? Your father is very disappointed. We both expect more from you, Fox.”

***

The doctor glanced over Scully’s chart and hooked it back over the end of her bed. Skinner followed him out of the room and left Mulder in the weighty silence of a room where, once again, Scully’s life hung in the balance. Pneumonia.

His nails dug into the sagging skin on his cheeks as he balanced his elbows on his knees. An all too familiar pose. Time passed in unrecognisable beats meted out with each pulse and bleep and wheeze from the equipment keeping her alive. Somewhere in his fatigued brain he figured she was owed a longer life, given all the air that had been pumped in to her lungs previously. He couldn’t muster up the energy to even snort out an ironic laugh. What he wouldn’t give for a roll of her eyes and an impatient, ‘it doesn’t work that way, Mulder.’

She told him once, with a flirty tap to his tie, that she was immortal. His willingness to believe in anything had long since departed. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to grab at that younger man, that over-confident fool who trusted no-one and everyone at the same time. All that he succeeded in doing was grasping hold of unwanted memories.

***

His rage when he saw her, uncovered on that gurney, eyes taped shut, was white-hot. It burnt through his veins so that he couldn’t process rational thought. Later, after the humiliation of being physically removed from the room, that rage pulsed through his blood dosing out a regular reminder of what he had to do. If she died, if Scully fucking died, because of his quest, he would go out all guns blazing, taking anyone and everyone with him. 

He remembered that feeling being so powerful that he found it suffocating. It was a weight in his chest, pushing outwards and inwards with enough pressure to make him feel that exploding or imploding were equal possibilities. He could have ended Cancer Man’s life with single shot, but he’d prickled at Mulder’s gossamer conscience with his ‘you can kill me now but you’ll never know the truth.’ He could have turned that gun on himself.

He could have stayed in his apartment and delivered terminal intensity. Instead, he sat at Scully’s bedside and waited in the strange silence of her room. Sometime during the night, a nurse brought him a blanket. A heavy knitted one with a satin edge that he rubbed between his finger and thumb until morning.

The apartment was as wrecked as his soul. He sunk to the floor and wept like he hadn’t since the Christmas of Samantha’s disappearance, when her absence that day was louder than her presence had been.

He’d given up. He’d poured out his soul to Scully as she lay in there. He’d denied it for too long. Melissa at least had the grace to accept the obvious. She was dying. Scully was dying.

But that was too late, wasn’t it? Now, it was the safest thing to do. To admit to someone how you felt when they were never going to respond. Just like telling Samantha he loved her and missed her when she’d gone. Just like his father saying he still loved him as he was walking out the door.

When the phone rang, his heart flipped in his chest then plumbed to the depths of his guts. Even though clinically she might have been considered dead, until that moment, Scully was still that naïve, sceptical, eager young woman who’d crept into his heart and refused to move. Hearing the dreaded words meant she’d be locked there, forever young. In the microseconds it took for him to decide to answer the call, he’d mentally flicked through all the times he wished he’d just taken her in his arms and kissed her instead of debating with her, dismissing her or ditching her; he’d wished a thousand times over that he’d sent her away after that first case; he’d ploughed through the different hair styles, suits, smiles she’d worn. He’d wished he’d never met her.

“I’m here,” he said. But he wasn’t. He was already thinking of who he could take down with him. He was checking out. He was dying.

***

The thing about hospitals is that they hold in life and they let it out. Births, life-saving surgeries, miracle recoveries, code blues, morphine overdoses under the guise of keeping a patient comfortable, priests offering consolation through the last rites. They hold in grief and they let it out. Mulder was suspended in that dichotomy too. Holding in hope and letting it out in fearful fits of rage. There was no change in Scully’s condition. As grey dawn seeped through the grey window blinds, no change seemed good; as midnight crept past with the bleep and rush of the machines breathing for her, no change was untenable.

Sometime during the third night a nurse covered him in a heavy warm blanket. The days were getting shorter, colder outside, he supposed. But time has a way of contracting around you, when your heart is being slowly crushed. He twisted on the seat and the blanket slipped. He brought it up under his chin, tried to find a position that didn’t cramp his back and neck, ran the ribboned edge between his fingers as he watched Scully’s face, looking for nuanced differences in her lips, her eyes, her cheeks. Her arms were untucked and it hit him that she might be cold too. He pulled himself out of the seat, let his blanket fall to the floor and called for the nurse. While he waited, he knelt next to her, holding her hand. The weight of it all, the constant dread, the lack of sleep, the helplessness, pushed his head down, and his hot tears flowed as his lips settled on the back of her hand.

Skinner ordered him home. Drove him there. 

“I’ll go back, you sleep. I’ll call you if there’s any change. If you don’t hear from me, I’ll pick you up at four.” He laid a hand on Mulder’s shoulder. “Eat something too.”

Mulder had long since come to recognise this as Skinner being caring. He showed his heart by being practical. He and Scully were quite similar in some ways. Scully would have done the same, the food, the rest, all the things the doctor orders. But he was not the one who’s sick. There was no way he was going to lie in their bed, their comfortable but empty bed, and sleep while his wife is on a hospital gurney.

He climbed to the attic, rubbing the back of his neck as the dust motes danced in the slant of sunlight from the small, square window. On his ascent he was of a mind to tidy, throw away the mess, clean up his life. But sitting among the crates and piles and oddities he was in a mind to preserve. It was like the hospital, he thought. Holding in and letting go.

It took him a while to understand he was looking for his mother’s shawl. The human brain is undoubtedly a complex organ, but the human mind is unfathomable. Scully was suspended in some otherworld, so sick her body had shut down, but he was looking for his long-dead mother’s shawl. If he were to analyse his own psyche he would probably conclude that the item was a shield, a way to wrap something nostalgic and comfortable around his body to block out the fear of losing Scully. His fingernails were black with grit and dust, his muscles bunched in his shoulders sending a throbbing pulse down his spine. He opened crates and shoe boxes and plastic tubs. He found books and files and greetings cards and photos. He chuckled and he wept. But he didn’t find the shawl.

There were boxes high on a shelf. He moved the step ladder, disturbed a mouse that scurried into a shadowy corner. He checked his cell again. Nothing. The waiting was always the worst. Time, such a feature of his life, stretched out to fill dark places. When she had the seizure last year, he didn’t have to wait too long for her to wake, but there had been too many other hours wasted in that suspended, desperate place. He pulled down the first box and it tumbled out of his grip, landing with a dusty crash on the floor. The first item that spilled loose were medical records and X-rays. And just like that, he was back at her bedside, kneeling on that cold hospital floor, sobbing silently around her hand.

***

Her face was beyond pale, red-ringed eyes sunken into her head, cracked, dry lips. She looked like one of the creatures they’d spent years chasing only to have them disappear into the shadows. She could have been a phantom, a ghoul, a spirit. But she wasn’t. She was flesh and bones, stricken with a deadly disease and she was disappearing in front of his eyes. He was supposed to be dead. He was the one who had disappeared into the shadows, had slipped into her room to see her, to talk to her. To talk, once again, when it was too late. His habit of opening his heart when all was lost had struck again. He wept against her hand as though his tears could enter her body like a lifeforce. His teeth scraped her skin and it tasted papery, flaking against his lips. Peeling her life away.

He didn’t know how long he’d been there, pressing her hand to his mouth, sobbing. But he knew his futile tears, hot rage and self-hatred needed to be channelled. Her death would invade his body like the cancer had hers, it would live in his veins and destroy him but it would also give him power to act. To end the blind quest he’d been on.

As it turned out, all that incandescent anger seeped from his pores when he heard the news of her remission. The chip worked. He sat at her bedside as she told him how the doctors were mystified.

“I can’t believe it,” he said.

She wrapped a thin arm around his neck and pulled his head to the crook of her neck. Her bony frame dug into his face but he didn’t care. He felt instantly lighter, muscles unclenching, nerves flittering back to life. The numb edges of his being sharpened like her chi had flowed into his veins. They fused at that moment. She clung to him, clawing at his back as she sobbed. He clutched her body to his wondrous at the joint beating of their hearts. A miracle.

And it didn’t truly sink in for days. He walked around light-headed, repeating the mantra ‘she’s in remission’ over and over. It sounded surreal. His brain knocked against his skull when he repeated the words, causing him a fleeting lapse in consciousness. The very idea of her being healthy and whole felt like sighting a UFO or cryptid; it left you feeling buzzed, body pulsing with energy and yet there was that slight element of doubt. What if it were fake?

For nights, he slept with a tee-shirt of hers that he’d taken home with a bundle of other clothes to wash for her. He hadn’t washed it, instead slipping it under his pillow to inhale the scent of her, a reminder of her return to him.

***

The files and X-rays didn’t fit back into the box the way they had before. He struggled to slot the boxes back onto the shelf. He pushed and slid and rearranged but all he succeeded in doing was unsettling more thick and tangled cobwebs so they covered his hair and made him cough.

He slumped to the floor and stretched his legs before him. He’d recovered nothing of value, nothing that he was looking for. He had simply accumulated a mountain of stuff to throw away. But he knew he wouldn’t. Holding on. That’s what he was impelled to do. He set his head against the wall desperate to sleep but resisting it for fear of slipping back into the miasma of memories that shadowed his mind. He reached his arm sideways, hairs sticking to the brickwork. He tapped against a box that was pushed against the wall. The lid slipped off and he walked his fingers up the cardboard and inside. Photo frames, something cold and metallic, intricately patterned, a trinket box maybe? A soft, cool padding at the very bottom, sleek to touch. He wrapped it around his hand. The shawl. He knew it before he saw it. It slithered out of the box and he pulled it to his lap, letting its heavy weight fall through his hands as his weeping echoed through the attic.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, startled him. Skinner.

Scully was sleeping again by the time he got there, but she’d woken briefly earlier.

“She knew who I was,” Skinner said, patting Mulder on the shoulder as he sank into the chair next to her bed. “She’s going to be okay, Mulder.”

Her hand fitted into his palm perfectly, made to measure. He nodded up at Skinner, watched him leave, listened to the sounds of the room. He watched the rise of her chest, stronger now. The way her mouth flickered at the edges, her eyes fluttered under her lids. She was dreaming. He hoped fervently that it was a happy dream, a safe dream.

The shawl rested on his lap and he looked down at it, silvery strands glittering in the soft light. He thought of his mother, his father, his sister. The way grief was woven through his life, like the threads in the shawl. But every now and again, there were brighter moments, the silvery strands that made life worthwhile.

Scully shifted, her head turning to face him. She opened her eyes, blinked slowly. She sniffed quietly as he moved forward, noses bumping. Her voice was stuck in her dried-out throat so he got her some water, held the paper cup to her lips, lifted her head from the pillow. She sipped and it looked like it hurt.

“I’ll get the nurse, Scully,” he said but she gripped his hand and pulled him back down. The shawl fell to the floor. She saw it, brows crinkling. He shifted the chair closer to her, scooping up the shawl and burying it in the gap between the bar of the bed and her body.

“It was my mother’s,” he said and she closed her eyes. Her arm moved slightly so that he was sure she could feel its softness. She strained to open her eyes again, move her mouth to respond. He laid two fingers over her lips and shushed her. A tear slipped from her eye, her fingers stroked the shawl, letting the fringing slip between them.

“Sleep now, Scully,” he said. “I’ll still be here when you wake up.”


End file.
